consultants and Advisors
Thomas Pearson
Thomas Pearson
Consultant
Thomas (he/him) provides responsive, strategic advice to organizations and their leadership so they can accomplish meaningful and lasting change. He helps facilitate search and leadership transition projects, lead planning and organizational change processes, and provide ongoing advisory support to arts leaders and boards. Recent work includes search or planning projects at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, ArtsPool, Arts Mid-Husdon, the Geffen Playhouse, Goodspeed Musicals, Southeastern Theatre Conference, Texas Ballet Theater, and others.
Thomas spent eleven years as Executive Director of New York Stage and Film (NYSAF), a leading organization dedicated to developing new work in process for theater, film, and beyond. During his tenure, NYSAF supported over 300 projects and 2500+ artists, including Tony Award winners Hamilton, Hadestown, and The Humans, and Pulitzer Prize finalists The Wolves (Sarah DeLappe) and Taylor Mac’s epic A 24-Decade History of Popular Music. Thomas’s role at NYSAF spanned strategy, operations, fundraising and external affairs. His time was marked by a strategic deepening of programming and organizational capacity, board and funder development, an expansion of the permanent year-round staff, and expanded commitments to pay equity, access, agency, and belonging. In accordance with this strategic growth, NYSAF’s institutional budget, annual contributed revenue, and net assets doubled.
Prior to NYSAF, Thomas was a theatrical literary agent at International Creative Management (ICM), where he represented a wide variety of artists in theater, dance, and classical music, as well as film, television, and new media platforms. He facilitated the development and premiere of work such as Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Passing Strange, Fela!, An Iliad, and Tarell Alvin McCraney’s landmark The Brother/Sister Plays; his clients included Stephen Belber, Michael Friedman, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Patricia McGregor, Charles L. Mee, Lisa Peterson, Will Power, Jose Rivera, Alex Timbers, and Evan Yionoulis. Other previous work includes four years at Off-Broadway’s New York Theatre Workshop, where he served as the general manager for the development and production of new work by artists such as Tony Kushner and Caryl Churchill.
He serves on the boards of Theater Mitu (Rubén Polendo, Founding Artistic Director) and the Haldane School Foundation, is the Chair of the Haldane Central School District Audit Committee, and was a founding board member of Les Fréres Corbusier (Alex Timbers, Artistic Director). Thomas received BA degrees in Literature and Theater Studies from Yale University, and lives in New York’s Hudson Valley with his family.
